Dr. Lorimer Moseley is a leading pain researcher whose work is dedicated to understanding and explaining pain (see Butler and Moseley, Explain Pain, 2003 and Moseley, Painful Yarns, 2007). In Painful Yarns, he tells a story from his own life that helps us understand important mechanisms of pain. As a young boy, Lorimer took hikes in the country and frequently came home with lots of nicks and scrapes on his legs. Although his mother was alarmed, they never bothered him or hurt him. [bravo!] While on a hike at age twenty-five, he got nicked on the leg and kept walking not thinking anything of it. When he got home, he saw fang marks fo the very poisonous Eastern Brown snake and found his left leg to be very swollen and painful. He spent several days in the hospital recovering from the bite and the left leg pain subsided. Five years later, he was walking in apark and noted a nick on his leg. He immediately fell to the ground experiencing a great deal of pain that was all the way up and down his left leg. He was rushed to a hsoptial only to find that he simply had a scrape, not a snake bite. Why all the pain? When he was a boy, his brain disregarded the mild pain from nicks and scrapes because they were interpreted as "not dangerous" and simply part of the enjoyment of walking in the country. However, after the life threatening situation with the snakebite, his brian now interpreted a small scrape as "very dangerous" and activated the same pain pathways that were learned five years earlier.
What is amazing is that the pain after a small scrape on Lorimer's leg lasted for two weeks. He's a pain researcher; he understands pain; he knew that nerve pathways rather than tissue damage caused his whole leg to feel real pain; yet the pain persisted for two weeks! The nerve patterns were activated and took a while to calm down and reverse, which they eventually did. But what might have happened if he didn't understand pain, and after one week he went to his doctor and asked, 'Why am I still having so much pain from a small scrape? The doctor might say, "Oh, I'm afraid that you might have "post-snake bite venom" syndrome. It's a chronic disorder. We don't know what causes it and we have no effective treatment for it." This is exactly the situation that occurs to people with fibromyalgia, whiplash, and chronic fatigue syndrome. The labeling of these disorders as being chronic and incurable leads to more fear, more resentment, and more pain. Another factor can greatly activate pain pathways. What if, during those two weeks after the scrape, something was happening in Lorimer's life: maybe his son got arrested, his mother passed away, or his wife had an affair. Emotions associated with those events trigger the same brain pathways that activate pain thus turning what would have been a self-limited disorder into a chronic one with little hope of cure.
